The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is proposing improvements to the algorithm used in its Motor Carrier Safety Status Measurement System, known more commonly as SafeStat. The agency uses the system to analyze current and historical safety performance and compliance information to rank the relative safety fitness of commercial motor carriers.
FMCSA proposes four basic changes:
A new traffic violations indicator, or TVI. The TVI would replace the moving violations indicator (MVI) in the driver safety evaluation area (SEA) value calculation. According to FMCSA, benefits of the change include identifying more carriers with higher crash risk, improving geographical coverage, using better data and covering more carriers;
A shortening of the data exposure time period from 30 months to 24 months. The change increases emphasis on more recent events and aligns the SafeStat time frame with other FMCSA systems and reports that use two years of safety event data;
Simplification of the accident SEA value calculation to be equal to the accident involvement indicator. The change establishes one standard of measuring crash rate, avoiding potentially conflicting results of multiple standards; and
Application of more vehicle out-of-service violation data for the vehicle inspection indicator (VII). FMCSA plans to include vehicle OOS violations that an enforcement officer may discover while conducting a Level 3, or driver-only, inspection.
Although the proposed changes are exempt from the requiement for rulemaking, FMCSA is offering interested parties the chance to review them and to offer comments by July 3. To do so, click here.
